As traditional merchants grapple with falling demand and stockpiles of unsold bottles, The Wine Society is charting a different course. Could Stevenage’s member-owned merchant be the unlikely hero fine wine needs?

The Wine Society is an intriguing case. More than any other institution, it approaches saintly status among many wine writers, who seem to view it as a semi-monastic order of benevolent buyers and sellers based in an abbey at Stevenage. On the other hand, the trade often seems to view it as a wickedly skewing force in the market, grumbling about its distribution and buying power, often while applying for its job vacancies and snapping up its allocations of sought-after names like GB Burlotto and Gonon.

Both camps are right in that, when it comes to the under-£12 section that does so much heavy lifting in UK retail, the society is very hard to beat because it works on a different margin structure to a regular online wine merchant. Yet with almost 180,000 active members, the society’s weakness has always been working with truly small producers – those who just can’t supply enough to make it worthwhile getting the logistics leviathan out of bed – and fine wine, which has traditionally been – and is still – dominated by men operating out of offices in clubbable London locations.

But this summer, the society launched its Spotlight on Spain, the first in a series of focuses on fine wine, as news broke that it was also recruiting for a head of fine wine. Given that every fine wine merchant I’ve spoken to in the past six months has the air of a recently divorced maths teacher who didn’t see it coming, the society’s timing seems unusual. Allocations of stalwart icon wines have been turned down, Bordeaux 2023 has been dismal and the mood among the Liv-ex set is somewhere between despair and defeat.

The fact that people aren’t buying fine wine is a crisis for fine wine merchants. The fact that they aren’t drinking it is a crisis for wine. Tens of thousands of the world’s great bottles are sitting in warehouses gathering dust, being sold and resold in a game of classed-growth hot potato. Just how are we meant to convince a new generation of wine lovers to get into wine when all the really good stuff is sitting in an air-conditioned warehouse?

That is exactly where the society has spotted its opening. Its members don’t just want to invest in fine wine. They want to drink it. Around 35,000 of its members buy fine wine in volume (as opposed to the odd bottle). And because there’s currently no easy way to flip those bottles back into the market, the wines end up where they should: in glasses, not portfolios.

The society has seen double-digit growth in fine wine every year since 2022. According to Pierre Mansour, director of wine, the Spanish campaign has been “a great success with demand significantly higher than our estimates. The concept trialled extremely well and it had a halo effect, driving engagement and increasing web traffic”.

This new fine wine focus could have a transformational impact on the market. It’s not a stretch to imagine that producers might give a larger allocation to the society, knowing the wines will be sold and drunk, than a traditional fine wine merchant where they are more likely to be flipped. The Wine Society might be the hero fine wine needs, managing to both support producers and reconnect fine wine with drinkers. By focusing on selling fine wines at the lowest prices to people who actually want to drink them instead of profit from them, the society might just be able to heal the fine market for everyone